Category Archives: Slider

If New York has its gentrified Meat Packing District, London has The Smithfield Market. The 140 years old market has been on site for over a thousand years. The slowly evolving market starts business at 3 am everyday excluding the weekends and Bank holidays.

G Lawrence Wholesale Meathas been very kind to open their doors to allow me to photograph on their super clean shop. The wonderfully fresh carcasses featured as the backdrop for the dress by Jaybeelyn Luna.

The design inspired by the spine was modelled by the talented artist Marjolaine Coste.

Every photographer has a specific genre or a few which they stay away from. The idea of a still-life and especially the cliche of photographing beautiful flowers were as tasty as drinking burnt caramel on a very hot day; bitter and dehydrating. I guess my blood sugar must have been very low for me to challenge this viewpoint.

Alexander James, a very talented photographer, uses classic nature morte objects and photographs them underwater in a black velvet-lined glass tank. I was inspired by his subversion of the classic genre by shooting objects differently. He gave a painting-like appearance to them through his technique of obtaining the image rather than through post processing.

I was also inspired by Impressionistic paintings, especially Monet and his works from his garden in Giverny. I wanted to breakdown some of their elements such as allowing pure colour to form a structure rather than black shadows and white highlights.

I transformed my bathroom into a tiny studio where a desk lamp became my only light source and my bathtub was where my subjects stood, or more accurately floated against the oscillations of waves created by a plastic lid and cascades of water from a pot. To challenge my photographic practice, I too stood away from post processing. The colours of the flowers on the camera were as vivid as they appear on the screen and only minute adjustments were made.

I hope you will enjoy my off-tangent series of work. This caramel was not burnt and accompanied my vanilla ice cream very well, and it was not overbearingly hot.

Destruction, air pollution and government policies… Where do you stand or are you taking a nap?

European Environment Agency (EEA) has announced in their “Air Quality in Europe 2013” report that 90% of the urban population within the European Union is exposed to one of the most damaging air pollutants and that the levels in which that damage can be caused to our health is lower than once it was believed.

Turkey is still not in the EU, however the finding of the EEA’s report still applies to the country I was born in. Furthermore in 2012 The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concluded that the level of air pollution was one of the highest out of the 36 countries that took part in the Better Life Index.

What does not make sense is the fact that compulsory “environmental impact assessments” for new projects had their rules changed. For instance, an area that would have been defined as a forest previously is now considered “not forest” or it can be classified under the new heading of “forests that won’t benefit from protection”.

Environmental policies were one of the reasons why thousands of people were protesting during the Istanbul Riots in May/June 2013 including myself. The GP-5 Soviet Russian Gas Mask in these photographs was not the one I have used to protect my respiratory system but an eBay purchase to be used in this photo-shoot inspired by the events.